


Some nights I can hear the footsteps of the stars

by Dienda



Category: True Detective
Genre: Friendship, Gen, the good years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-18 22:58:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5946462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dienda/pseuds/Dienda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Didn't you tell me one time, at dinner, you used to make up stories about the stars?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some nights I can hear the footsteps of the stars

Marty tells him to come to dinner on Friday night. Instead of flowers Rust shows up with a tub of ice-cream that gets a bright smile from the girls and an amused headshake from Maggie. After that first time, after a couple of years, he’s gotten better at orbiting the Harts’ family life; being an expected guest, a friend is a kind of familiarity he’d never experienced before. Sometimes ―when the tide of his own hurt is low, when Marty’s storm is calm― he doesn’t think of what could have been and has a good time.

After dinner, Maggie turns down Rust’s offer to help with the dishes and Marty nudges him through the kitchen door to the backyard, Rust’s arm in one hand and a two beers in the other.

They sit out back, chairs close together on the deck, profiles painted amber by the borrowed glow of the kitchen lamp, swatting bugs and talking shop with their hard-earned amity; they’ve still got heaps of paperwork from the double murder they just closed and Rust’s assisting a robbery case down in Franklin.

Marty’s just brought them a new round of beers when there’s a short moment of buzzing followed by a loud metallic blast and, a second later, the lights flicker and die. They both sit up, blinking at the sudden gloom.

“It was the damn utility pole, right?” Marty mutters and, even blinded by the dark, Rust can feel him tense up like an old guard dog.

Rust hums. “Yeah.”

“Fuck, second time it happens this month.” Marty sags back into the chair. The one remaining source of light is the cloud of lighting bugs that swarm around the Harts’ lime tree at the far end of the yard. Silence stretches long and heavy, a velvet cloak that sinks deeper than the usual quietness. In a distant yard, a screen door opens with a long whine and slams shut a moment later. Eventually, a daring cricket resumes his song and the night birds take the chance to display their hooting.

The back door slides open behind them and Maggie steps out, a shadow clad in ghostly grey.

“That sounded bad.”

Marty takes a swig of his beer and nods. “Looks like the transformer got fried to hell. Again.”

Maggie sighs, leans one hip against her husband’s chair. “It’ll be a while then.”

“Few hours. Last time they couldn’t be bothered to send someone out.”

“I’ll call the power company.”

Rust feels this is his cue to leave, he lets out a long sigh and makes to stand. “I better get going.”

“Can’t be safe to drive like this.” Maggie says in her best mom voice. “You’re staying right here until the lights come back.”

Rust has driven in the dark before. Fuck he’s driven blind drunk, high off his ass on coke and heroin; through blizzards and downpours and the odd dust storm. Five blocks of suburban darkness hardly count as dangerous.

He snorts. “And if it don’t come back?”

“We have a guest room.”

He turns to his partner, expecting an explosion of a different kind. Back in ‘95 Marty would’ve had a fucking stroke at the mere thought of Rust spending the night, but fuck if it ain’t testament to how much things have changed between them that right now he just scoffs and shrugs his shoulders.

“What the hell you lookin’ at me for? You heard the lady, you ain’t going anywhere so settle down.”

“It ain’t that far and it ain’t that late.”

Marty slaps the side of Rust’s leg. “There you go, we got time. Shut the fuck up and drink your beer.”

“I’m gonna report it and check on the girls.” Maggie’s wedding band winks in the dark as she pats Marty’s shoulder before stepping back inside.

Neither of them tries to pick up the thread of their previous conversation, it withered and vanished along with the sodium glow of the lightbulbs, only the crickets speak out loud as the men watch the fireflies signal each other like flickering lemon drops. There’s no moon tonight and the stars are using the extra darkness to preen and shine, blue-white diamonds on a velvet sheet. Rust examines them carefully, trying to make out the constellations, eyes immediately drawn to the familiar handle of the Big Dipper.

“Y’know, I’ve seen pictures of them northern lights,” says Marty in a rough murmur. He’s looking up as well. “They really look like that? All those colors?”

Rust takes a long swig of his beer and lets his lungs fill with the garden’s citrus scent. “They’re even better, Marty. They move.”

“What’d you mean?”

“They waver. You go out on a winter night, the sky’s lit up, like ribbons in the wind, smoke. Pink, green, purple.” He struggles to find the right words, lets the shades of a memory superimpose on this southern night. “It’s like being underwater and looking up to see the current dancing above your head in fucking Technicolor.”

Marty clears his throat, still looking up. “That sounds like something else.”

Rust nods. _It’s the only thing I miss_ , he doesn’t say.

“Way more stars up in Alaska, right?”

“Just some different ones. They’re all up there, we’re just too blind with our fake lights and our bullshit, so-called civilization. When I was a kid I had this book ‘bout constellations, with all these charts and names, all them myths. The Seven Sisters, the Dog Star, Cassiopeia. It only said enough to explain the names. We lived in a clearing in the woods, when my Pop was away I’d sit outside and look up at the sky, try to fill the gaps in the tales, make up my own when all I had to go was the name of a star.”

“You ever, uh, feel something weird looking at them? Y’know…” Marty gestures to the side of his own head, the gesture clumsy but not mocking.

Rust is suddenly aware of the velvet-like intimacy of the moment. He doesn’t know if they couldn’t’ve had this conversation in any other place, in the long hours in the car or across their desks at the bullpen, at dinner with Maggie and the girls. If he could be seen, Marty wouldn’t be asking these questions. If Rust could be seen, he wouldn’t answer them.

Instead of poking at the thought like a scab he takes another sip of his beer and lets it be.

“I hear ‘em. Sometimes.” He doesn’t know that thirteen years from now Marty will recall this conversation but Rust can tell that, of all the things he’s told the other man about his life in Alaska, this feels like the only one that matters. The one that’s not tainted by harshness. “They ring. Up in Alaska it was―” Rust closes his eyes to coax the sound to the front of his mind. “Piano keys, clear notes. A song―I don’t know, like somethin’ liquid.”

“What do they sound like, out here?”

Rust looks up, focuses on the blue pinpricks littering the night like the lighting bugs on the tree and lets the sensation approach him like a skittish fox. Marty probably thinks his head is a full time mess of crossed wires and sensorial input but the truth is it comes and goes, sometimes he can predict the synesthesia like the aura before a seizure, an omen hanging above his head; most of the time though, the colors, the tastes ―the visions― are abrupt enough to catch him wrong-footed.

“Porcelain bells,” he says, with the sound threading softly in his ears. “Glass shattering on a tile floor. Like every star is a shard, scattering across the night sky.”

Silence stretches between them, all Rust can see is his partner’s blue-tinted profile gazing up at the sky. Marty’s tracing back the steps of Rust’s synesthesia: casting a line and reeling the sound in like he would a fish.

“Sounds kinda fitting.” There’s a smile in Marty’s voice and Rust knows he understands that it ain’t necessarily an ugly sound, shattering. He clinks their bottles together and it’s not too different from the song ringing in the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtIW2r1EalM) is kinda how I imagine Rust's Alaskan stars sound like.


End file.
